The Patriots could easily be undefeated in the Super Bowl. They could also be the Buffalo Bills.

With a bit of good fortune, a few twists of fate and some (additional) help from already accommodating officials, the New England Patriots of the Tom Brady/Bill Belichick era could easily be an undefeated 7-0 in the Super Bowl, a number that wouldn’t just make them the greatest NFL dynasty ever but perhaps the greatest sports dynasty too.

Then again, with a little bad luck, the Pats of the 2000s could also be 0-7 in the Super Bowl and basically just be a bulked-up version of the Buffalo Bills.

The Patriots have played seven close NFL championship games – four came down to the final plays, six came down to the final minutes and the most clear-cut victory was a three-point win over a team that had multiple opportunities to tie or take the lead in the final quarter.

Does it mean anything that the most dominant team in NFL history never, you know, dominates?

Through all that, New England is 5-2 in the games. But what should be the Pats’ Super Bowl record? Are they lucky to be 5-2? How easily could the team be a mediocre 2-5? And was 7-0 or 0-7 realistic? We’ll take a look at each New England Patriots Super Bowl to determine whether the franchise’s Super Bowl record is legit.

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First though, we have to accept the imperfection of such an exercise. If the Back to the Future movies have shown us anything, it’s that tinkering with the past can have massive consequences on the future. To say, for instance, that New England (and, remember, we’re just talking about the Brady years here) should have lost its first Super Bowl is fine. But if they did actually lose that game, then the rest of the franchise’s timeline would be completely different.

Or if David Tyree doesn’t catch the ball on his helmet in Super Bowl LII, the Patriots go undefeated in 2007 and, with that year’s title, we can now say they’d be overall in the Super Bowl. Easy as that. Right?

Not quite. Every positive and negative moment plays a part in shaping what Brady and Belichick have done in the future. If Tyree doesn’t catch the ball, the Patriots win the Super Bowl. As a result, they host the season-opening Thursday night game in 2008 (as all Super Bowl champions do) and Brady isn’t playing a 1:00 p.m. game at home on the first Sunday of the season. He doesn’t get hit by Bernard Pollard and doesn’t suffer a season-ending knee injury. What happens the rest of the year and the year after that? Do the Pats turn up the heat in ’08 to get the Super Bowl that was stolen from them? Is Brady still motivated to play at 40 after the perfection of 19-0 in 2007? You could ask 10,000 questions based off just one small change to history.

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The point is, you can’t flip one thing about Tom Brady and assume everything that’s happened to him since would be the same. It’s the butterfly effect, if butterflies could eat healthy, marry up and coerce people into deflating footballs.

We love to play the “what if?” game (me as much as anybody) but create those scenarios in their own little vacuum, with no regard for how one action directly (or indirectly) affects the next one. But without benefit of Michael J. Fox or a DeLorean, we can’t see how the dominos would have tumbled if these games went different ways. So instead, we’ll go through each of the Pats Super Bowls individually to see whether 5-2 they actually have looks legit.

Super Bowl LI: Patriots 34, Falcons 28 (OT)

Won in overtime after 25-point comeback

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The Pats were never to going to lose last year’s Super Bowl 28-3, so a mini-comeback was easy to see coming. Even when New England made it a one-score game, it all seemed so predestined. Obviously this was going to happen. But then, with 4:47 left, Matt Ryan hit Julio Jones for a 27-yard pass that put the Falcons on New England’s 22-yard line. It was a nice comeback and all, good job for the effort, but the Jones catch was game over. But Atlanta somehow lost 23 yards on the next three plays, knocked itself out of field-goal range and handed Brady and the Pats their Super Bowl rings right then and there. Some mistakes are created. Other mistakes are made. These were the latter.

Won: Patriots

Should have won: Falcons

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